Amateur Planet Hunters Find First Planet In a Four-Star System

The Bad Astronomer writes "For the first time, a planet has been found in a stellar system composed of four stars. The planet, called PH-1, orbits a binary star made of two sun-like stars in a tight orbit. That binary is itself orbited by another binary pair much farther out. Even more amazing, this planet was found by two "citizen scientists", amateurs who participated in Planet Hunters, a project which puts Kepler Observatory data online for lay people to analyze. At least two confirmed planets have been found by this project, but this is the first — ever — in a quaternary system."

Comments

Re:Clearly this is Binar 0

[SJHillman]

Or possibly the system that Firefly takes place in. That also had four stars.

Next thing you know...

[GODISNOWHERE]

Gillette sponsors a team of astronomers to find a planetary system of five stars. http://www.theonion.com/articles/fuck-everything-were-doing-five-blades,11056/ [Link contains strong language that may be considered NSFW]

Re:Clearly this is Binar 0

[roc97007]

Or Asimov's Nightfall? (The story, not the movie.)

Obligatory

[Anonymous Coward]

Picard : There...are...FOUR...lights!

Re:Hey everybody! It's Phil Plait!

[foniksonik]

You could save the rest of us by linking to said original source.

Pretty surprising

[Grayhand]

If planets can form with the gravitational forces of a dual binary system I have to believe virtually all suns have planets of some form. Stars tend to have left over material when they form and that tends to form planets. The more conditions they find that can support planets the more system candidates there are for planets.

Re:Pretty surprising

[gstoddart]

And it serves to consistently push up the values of some of the terms in Drake's equation.

Back in the early 90's when I hung out with astronomers, the idea of finding exoplanets was still pretty new, and now it seems pretty commonplace.

To me, even if it's not intelligent life we'll ever make contact with, the likelihood that life has evolved on other planets seems like it would pretty much be a near certainty -- to me it has always seemed improbable that only our planet in the arse end of a galaxy would have done so.

Granted, the universe is a fairly hostile place that has lots of ways to wipe out a budding intelligent species. But the notion that we're singularly unique in terms of evolving life in all of that vastness seems improbable.

Six stars

[doti]

and we'd get Nightfall

Re:Six stars

[Neil Boekend]

Easy, the planet could have a slow rotation. The planet orbits two stars (who orbit each other extremely closely). At an orbit further out two other stars orbit the entire system of 2 stars and a planet. The large orbit of the "outer stars" means everything can be in such a configuration:
0 = star . = planet _ = space because nbsp's don't work

00 _ _ _ _ 00 .

This would give a night. Half a year later (from the planets POV)

00 _ _ _ . 00
and they have no night.

My question is: how can such a system be stable? The planet would have vastly different gravitational forces when it's between the starts as opposed to when it's not between the stars. I suppose the outer stars could be in an extremely big orbit (twice the size of Pluto's) so the effect would be slow, but I expect a great risk of orbital instability and thus crashing into the star or being flung out of orbit into the vastness of space. Neither are fun.